1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to emergency services. More particularly, it relates to emergency alert (e.g., Emergency alert™ type services) and technology for land-based and/or wireless phones, including and particularly Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP) phones.
2. Background of Related Art
Many communities have, or are in the process of, implementing what is known as an emergency alert system. An emergency alert system allows an emergency center to rapidly notify by telephone residents and businesses within a given geographical area affected by any given emergency. The larger the emergency, the larger the affected community and telephones to be notified. Public safety access points (PSAPs) typically employ emergency alert in emergency situations where it is necessary to contact thousands of citizens to alert them of pending or potential dangers such as neighborhood evacuations, tornado warnings, etc.
Current emergency alert systems employ banks of telephone dialers to quickly work through a list of hundreds, and even thousands (or more) telephone numbers, playing an audio recording to each answered phone. Some systems will leave the emergency message on an answering machine if that is what answers the line. Other emergency alert systems will keep track of which telephone numbers in a list are not answered after a predetermined number of rings, and will attempt to redial those numbers a predetermined number of times in an attempt to make contact.
Conventional emergency alert systems are based on the location of land-based (or street address-associated) telephones. For other phones, such as wireless phones, or voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) phones, the users must register their phone number in the emergency alert system at a given location.
As VoIP promises to become the predominant telecommunications technology in the world, heightened emphasis will be placed on the registration process of VoIP phones to associate those phone numbers with a given location.
The present inventor has appreciated that due to the mobile and otherwise nomadic capabilities of VoIP telephones, however, the challenge of routing 911 calls with adequate automatic location identification (ALI) data to PSAPs is made more difficult. The existing solution to this problem is standardized in the NENA i2 Migratory standard. This standard uses dynamic ALI updates based upon emergency services query keys (ESQKs), and ALI steering, to supply accurate ALI data to a given public safety access point (PSAP) attempting to conduct an emergency alert set of calls. Although this solution is effective in getting 911 calls TO a PSAP, it has inherent problems when the PSAP itself initiates calls to individual telephones in the so-called “emergency alert” scenario.
Most emergency alert solutions today rely upon telephone numbers in an ALI database that are linked with the address where the phone is located. After selecting a particular geographical area, emergency alert solutions determine from the ALI database which telephone numbers are located in that area, and then commence to dial each number one by one. Depending upon how large the region is, and how large the outdialing phone banks are, the notification time can take several minutes to several hours.
However, such conventional solutions have disadvantages with conventional emergency alert systems, mostly because typical wireless and VoIP phones within the affected emergency region may not be included in the emergency alert process. Either the wireless or VoIP phone is not registered with an accurate location (e.g., it may currently not be at the registered location), or they simply might not have a specific telephone number listed in the ALI database, much less a specific current location. And even if it is listed in the ALI database, because many wireless and VoIP phones are mobile, there is no assurance that any particular wireless or VoIP phone may or may not be within the region of concern at the time of the concern.
In a VoIP phone network, the entity that knows the location of a specific VoIP phone is the VoIP positioning center (VPC). In the case of a completely wireless phone (e.g., cellular, WiFI), there may not be any network entity that knows its location. Without assurance that a particular phone is within a given area of concern, or without knowledge of VoIP phone numbers that exist within the given PSAP's jurisdiction, the PSAP cannot reliably issue emergency warnings to these phones.
There is a need for a better emergency alert system capable of quickly and reliably alerting wireless and/or VoIP phones currently within a region affected by a given emergency message.